The Honors College at LSC-Kingwood

Honors at LSC-Kingwood is a “college within a college” designed for high-achieving, motivated students who desire a comprehensive college experience and, through their experiences, want to grow to their full potentials. Honors students seek to improve their academic transcripts, their transferability to four-year colleges and universities, and/or their future employability. There are a wide range of opportunities for incoming students working toward an Honors AA or Honors AS degree, to students of any discipline pursuing honors distinction upon graduation, to students simply interested in earning individual honors course credit. Honors provides challenging coursework across the core disciplines.

Our Mission

Honors at LSC-Kingwood enhances the first-year and sophomore experience by providing a community on campus that cultivates our highest level of academic excellence inside and outside the classroom.

Our Curriculum

Honors Classes

Honors classes offer students a classroom environment that is different from non-honors. As honors classes are smaller, they engage and challenge students through close, personal contact with faculty, and through seminar-style or discussion-based formats. The focus is on the student since honors does not employ the lecture and listen teaching method. Rather, an honors classroom is a communal space of shared learning between students, as well as between the professor and students. Often, an honors class is a place of experimentation and innovation in teaching and learning.

Honors classes also include research into their curriculums, where students, with the guidance of their professors, undertake a semester-length honors project, beginning with a research proposal and ending with an analytical or argumentative research essay that follows the conventions of the discipline. Afterwards, students give an oral or poster presentation. Together, the essay and the presentation compose the honors project.

In addition, many honors classes are enriched by experiential learning – which means learning through doing. Faculty may place their classroom in the real world and teach students to put discipline-specific skills into practice by conducting research in the field, at a lab, or at a museum, or they may attend an arts performance for review, among other options.

Honors Seminars

Besides honors classes, students may have the option of enrolling in an honors special topics seminar, also referred to as an independent study. Honors seminars may be offered for subject areas that are not available as honors classes, and they may be tailored to a specific theme or issue of relevance. Students take the non-honors class for academic credit. In the honors seminar, they work with an honors professor on their projects in order to earn honors credit. Approval to be enrolled in an honors seminar must be granted by the Honors Director.

Please Note: An honors seminar is graded as pass/no pass. It does not alter the student’s GPA, but it is recorded on the student’s transcript.

Our Co-curriculum

Honors co-curriculum supports students on their honors projects for classes and seminars. Workshops are designed to help students acquire the skills that they may not yet have so that they may succeed on their projects, improve upon already acquired skills so that they may progress in their academic careers, and/or work on their projects with fellow students and workshop facilitator(s) in a collegial, supportive environment. An essential and required component of the honors curriculum, co-curricular workshops help to cultivate our honors community and provide students with the overall honors experience.

Our Extracurricular Activities

Honors extracurricular activities, activities outside of the classroom that complement academic studies, are an integral part of a comprehensive honors education. Our extracurricular program encourages students to put their studies into practice. Like honors classes and seminars, these opportunities foster academic excellence by enabling honors students’ greater responsibility and initiative in their academic careers. Students participate in special on-campus or off-campus events, such as orientations, seminars, lectures, or conferences, and some students may travel within the state or country, or they may undertake a study abroad.